#while its reasonable to do research about ethnic groups and cultures you dont know about before you write characters like that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kienansidhe · 3 years

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hewwo i just sent an ask abt this to a kpop fandom writer and wanted to talk abt it here:

idc abt rpf rlly cause celebrities are fucking rich and they can just refrain from reading ppls fantasies on the internet and it doesnt affect them, but!! real, regular korean ppl in the diaspora are affected by the way kpop fandom talks about and writes about korean characters. obviously were not a monolith and some korean ppl dont rlly care but its deeply hurtful to me, as one queer korean american.

the writer in question runs a very enjoyable trans porn writing blog, but they recently made a post to check on interest in them posting some of their kpop fandom writing, with the names removed, but specifically because they wanted to use words like hyung and unnie. they said they wouldnt be fetishizing koreans or korean honorifics because they are actively studying korean.

studying our language and using our words correctly doesnt make cherry picking cute korean words for an otherwise english fic not fetishization, whether its porn or sfw. fetishization is not sexualization. it can be sexual, but fetishization is about the removal of pieces of a culture you think are cute or exotic or fascinating or what have you and using them for your purposes without the context of the people of that culture, their customs, their history, their lives, and their personhood. writing fic using korean words is literally just for aesthetic. its like kpop artists stealing black aesthetics and styles. its like nonblack people putting on aave to sound cool while disrespecting actual black people and having the ability to code switch back to sounding "respectable" and having the privilege from doing so.

writing vapid stories about supposedly korean characters where the only reason people know theyre korean is their names and a sprinkling of korean words is fetishization! its pasting a korean aesthetic on characters you have otherwise put no thought and research into.

and like. at the end of the day its not that huge a deal in fanfic spheres. ppl writing for fun on ao3 does not really materially affect the korean diaspora, a fic doesnt rlly need to be as heavily researched as a for profit novel going through a commercial publisher. but its incredibly alienating to find a space that is comfortable for my trans identity and then find that its weirdly obsessed with the aesthetic of my ethnicity. if they go forward with posting their fics im sure ill find other blogs, tho ill def miss their writing style and good trans porn is slim pickings already lol. like ill live. but its one more thing. one more thing in an ongoing stream of alienation ive dealt with my whole life, you know?

im not gonna harass and fuck with ppl who wanna write their fun little fantasies on the internet, esp if its on ao3 and properly tagged. but like. i rlly wish the kpop fandom would think harder about how theyre conceptualizing korean people and how theyre presenting us to others, and about how we feel when we see them trying on our aesthetics while if we have too heavy an accent or our names are too foreign we lose out on jobs. i rlly wish theyd think abt the way they shape a view of koreans as milky skinned half moon eyed skinny pretty boys and long legged dream girls, while everyday non-celebrity koreans are discriminated against, and admitting were korean almost invariably results in people asking what we think of x kpop group or kdrama, when we are so much more as individuals.

fetishization is pervasive and can seem trivial, but it truly blocks our ability to be seen as people, our ability to talk about our struggles in the diaspora, and our day to day mental health.

i am sick to death of kpop stans.

#headspace #korean american #korea #korean #kpop #korean stuff #okay to reblog but if you clown on this post i will steal all your teeth

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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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As someone who has researched school segregation and interviewed hundreds of white parents, I know that one of the biggest barriers to achieving meaningful integration in public education is how the most politically powerful parents in any school system — usually many of the white parents — come to understand what the “good” schools are and what is “best” for their children.

As a former public school parent and a white woman with a white son who performs well on the metrics that get students into the most selective public schools, I know the peer pressure that white parents feel to get their children into these high-status schools. I remember another white parent, when she learned that my son was not going to the most selective, predominantly white middle school in our district, looking at me in disbelief and saying, “I thought he had high tests scores?”

Yes, he did have high test scores and, yes, he most likely would have been accepted to the selective middle school, which many of his friends’ parents were determined to get their children into. But he did not want to go to that school.

He thought the students there looked bored when he toured it. I did not want him to go there either, because he was a sensitive kid who needed a school with a strong sense of community and care, which that school lacked. We were both upset by the almost completely white student body in this selective school located in the center of a racially and ethnically diverse community school district.

Really, the only reason to send him there would have been because it would give him — and, by default, his parents — a sense of status and prestige. This school had the highest test scores in the district, my son noted, because it only accepted the students with the highest test scores. In his middle school mind, being selective in and of itself did not make a school “good.” He had higher standards for a school than that. Too bad more white parents do not see it that way.

New York City has become the poster child of intense racial segregation, but the issues here are not unique to the Big Apple, nor is the challenge of implementing solutions. The New York City Mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group has released its preliminary report outlining next steps for the city’s Department of Education to lessen chronic racial and social-class segregation in the public schools. This Advisory Group, of which I am a member, laid out reachable goals to address equal access and resources, school accountability for diversity, and new teaching strategies to ensure that all students feel valued and affirmed.

One of the most pivotal factors in how far these recommendations can go in New York and elsewhere is the amount of support that such plans receive from public school parents. In particular, white parents too often say they want integration while simultaneously opting out of diverse schools in favor of those that are more selective, of higher status among their peers, and predominantly white and/or Asian.

Thus, as white parents navigate the shifting terrain of school choice and enrollment, they need to understand that having one’s child at the top of a rigid and segregated hierarchy of schools is not always the best parenting decision, on several levels. Taking a deep breath and paying less attention to what other white parents say and more attention to your children and their teachers will enable you to make choices that can not only better fit their learning styles, but also do more to make our public school system more integrated and better.

Cutting-edge research in brain science and education tells us that students learn better and deeper when their ways of knowing a topic are challenged by those who have different life experiences and worldviews. A recent report on learning by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine demonstrates that the culture of our families and communities plays a major role in how we learn.

This means that in many instances there is not a single right or wrong way of understanding a concept or interpreting a work of literature. We understand things in slightly different ways because of our histories and backgrounds. Having your children exposed to these different ways of knowing prepares them for a world of cultural complexity and constant uncertainty.

Indeed, for the first 175 years of public education in the United States, the “right” answers to most questions have been normed around white and mostly northern European culture. In the last 30 years, we have codified these culturally specific ways of knowing in high-stakes standardized tests that Asian students also tend to perform well on, particularly in math.

Taking a deep breath and paying less attention to what other white parents say and more attention to your child and their teachers will enable you to make choices that can not only better fit their learning style, but also do more to make our public school system more integrated and better.

The result is that we consistently sort and select students based on their cultural histories, ways of knowing and prior opportunities to learn. This racial hierarchy becomes so ingrained that even when schools enrolling mostly black and Latino students have high test scores, we still see them as “bad” schools.

In fact, in a study we conducted on Long Island, we found that the race of the students in the school system affected property values of otherwise identical houses in districts with the same test score data by as much as $50,000. In other words, the perception of “good” schools is too often about the perception of race, even when black and Latino students perform well on tests normed toward white students.

And still, despite this evidence and the call for more integration, many white parents continue to derive status and honor from one another when their children are selected into predominantly white or Asian schools regardless of the climate or characteristics of these schools. As the viral video of a parent meeting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last year demonstrated, white parents can become very angry when the admissions policies to these schools change.

Too often the parents live vicariously through their children, and thus feel “gifted” or elite themselves when their children are admitted to selective schools. But the fact is that children usually want to be in schools where they feel emotionally safe and cared for by the adults and other children at the same time that they are engaged and challenged to think more deeply about complex issues than the possible answers on a multiple-choice test. As the rich evidence in the National Academies Report demonstrates, students learn best in these settings, even if they’re not the schools with the highest test scores or the most white and affluent students. In fact, it’s the latter schools that often have high rates of anxiety, cheating, drug and alcohol abuse and bullying.

It can be difficult for some parents to choose a more nurturing school for their child if it does not confer status and approval from their family, friends and acquaintances. But until more white parents make those choices, the hierarchy and the racial segregation will remain. While the NYC Mayor’s Advisory Group’s sage advice to rate schools based on diversity as well as test scores is a solid first step to address these race-based perceptions of “good” schools, white parents must also listen to their children and their hearts before saying they support integration while choosing segregation.

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insufficient-earth-skills · 7 years

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The glass slipper - Lindsey Morgan interview quote.

So it’s hiatus and I guess that means ‘let’s educate my fellow fans on concepts in gender studies’ time! Lindsey Morgan just posted about a recent interview on her instagram and there’s this quote in it:

As a working actress, it still baffles me how in 2017 women are being represented. There are countless auditions available for ‘the slut’, 'the girlfriend’, 'the mother’, 'the b*tch’, or ‘the prize’ for the lead male character. I think the amount of archaic stories of women waiting for a man to save them, fix them, and give them purpose is overdone. I always think of Cinderella and wonder if she didn’t have that glass slipper where would she be now? I’d love to see an ending re-write: successful businesswoman Cinderella is now running “Cindr” an all musical, friendly mice cleaning company and is killing it!

Source (it’s very short, you should read it).

Lindsey just used a concept that is used in actual management studies to analyze gender and race dynamics, stereotypes and discrimination. We all know the glass ceiling, have probably heard about the glass cliff (women are more likely to be promoted to high ranking functions when a company is veering towards bankruptcy - that way the men dont lose face and the woman can be blamed) and are familiar with the glass elevator (men in female dominated fields rise quickly to a higher position even though people working in that field may be used to female authority figures), but what is the glass slipper, you might ask? Well, I’m glad you did because it’s actualy almost exactly what Lindsey describes. It was coined this decade by a researcher of the name Karen Ashcraft and was meant to make it easier to point out that in recruiting people and defining the characteristics of a job, stereotypes and prejudices play a big role. She did this because it was necessary to look at how ideas about diversity (read: minority groups and women) influenced the way people thought and talked about jobs, and consequently what people they were willing to hire for a certain job. Previously, researchers used to look at jobs as something to derive your identity from, but Ashcraft pointed out that this is actually a bilateral relationship, not a unilateral one. You derive identity from your job, but your job derives its status and identity from you and others who perform it. If, due to economic and political reasons a group with the same ethno-cultural characteristics starts to work in one field, they will become associated with each other in a very disctinct way. In her article, which is so full of abstracts sociological and management studies concepts your head will explode, Ashcraft uses the example of female pilots. In the early years of aviation, the ideal pilot was someone lightweight, agile, quick-thinking - and many female stunt pilots were well known since figure flying was a big thing. Slowly that started to change when commercial flights became a thing and with that the professionalization of pilots. Suddenly a pilot could not be seen as dainty and doing something purely for the looks of it, they had to be sturdy and trustworthy. Add to that a depression era suppression of women’s emancipation and … enter male pilots and female stewardesses.

I find it so interesting that Lindsey uses this metaphor (knowingly or not) to talk about her own struggles with being cast as stereotypes that are linked to Latina women. In the field of acting, the glass slipper may even be the most obvious to point out - but it also seems too obvious for many people to notice. In a field that is based on trusting people to move beyond their own experiences and inhabit those of others, it’s even more striking that many filmmakers can’t move beyond that mindset of determinism. We need people like Lindsey that keep pointing out double standards and dscriminatory mechanisms like this, that aren’t always visible for white people, upper or even middle class people or for men. More than that, we need people to make conscious casting decisions - and those decisions can’t always be gender or race blind. I heard Jason say on the @metastation podcast that they sent out a race blind casting call for Raven and Monty (and presumably for other characters who ended up being played by a white actor as well - though not all of them) and while I’m glad that that worked out, we also do need more people to pull a Lin-Manuel Miranda and say ‘oh hey, I’mma hire an ethnically diverse cast just to have an ethnically diverse cast because we need to let people see that that doesn’t take away from the content of the story and that white people/men/… can still relate to that’. If you, as a content creator, want to show your audience that you don’t think the white male is default human and all the others are there to fulfill certain stereotypes, you need to actively hire minorities and women and give them roles that portray them as humans first. (And those minorities and women should, where possible, demand those roles, but that’s a story for another day.)

#lindsey morgan #the glass slipper #management studies #gender studies #discrimination #watch me go on intersectional feminist rants 30 mins before my bedtime

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